The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
Implementation of virtual local area networks (VLANs) are well-known in the art and provide a means for allowing hosts located in distributed locations in a network to appear as if they were on a single LAN. FIG. 1A illustrates the (prior art) basic concept in which two VLANs 110 (with hosts 111-113) and 120 (with hosts 121-122) are desired, while these hosts are distributed as shown in example network 150.
A common industry standard used in such networks is IEEE 802.1Q, which was a project in the IEEE 802 standards process to develop a mechanism to allow multiple bridged networks to transparently share the same physical network link without leakage of information between networks (i.e. trunking). IEEE 802.1Q is also the name of the standard issued by this process, and in common usage the name of the encapsulation protocol used to implement this mechanism over Ethernet networks. IEEE 802.1Q also defines the meaning of a virtual LAN or VLAN with respect to the specific conceptual model underpinning bridging at the MAC layer and to the IEEE 802.1D spanning tree protocol. This protocol allows for individual VLANS to communicate with one another with the use of a layer-3 (network) router. 802.1Q does not actually encapsulate the original frame. Instead, it adds an extra 4-bytes in the original Ethernet header. The EtherType is changed to 0x8100, denoting the new frame format. This is followed by a header that contains the following fields:                user_priority: this 3-bit field can be used to store a priority level for the frame. Use of this field is defined in IEEE 802.1p.        CFI: a 1-bit flag denoting whether MAC addresses in the frame are in canonical format. This is called the Canonical Format Indicator.        VID: a 12-bit VLAN ID, allowing up to 4096 VLANs.        
FIG. 1B illustrates a prior art 802.1Q compliant switch 176 that sends and receives packets (175) with the 12-bit VLAN ID with hosts 171-172. Switch 172 identifies the VLAN associated with a particular packet based on a look operation on its 12-bit VLAN ID on a VLAN forwarding data structure, and therefore, switch 172 only supports a maximum of 4096 VLANs.